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08/29/2007

Connection

We’ve been having a hard time lately, I’ve got several blog posts that I want to write up that I can’t get near (and I’m about to make it harder by writing this instead).  Karen reached a point of mothering overload last week, and a friend stepped in to help her out. The friend is a good friend but parents more or less in the conventional manner. It’s fair to say’s she tends toward our way of doing things but most of the help consisted of the mainstream idea that at times like this you need to get the mother away from the children.

Basically the maintream solution to this problem is through separation from the children. I want to be clear that I’m not criticising this friend in particular, she took on an extra load herself and has indeed given Karen a break but I suspect that if we’d had friends in town who parent like us their instinct would have been toward building connections instead of creating separation. They probably would have descended on the house to take some of the responsibility away while still enabling us to maintain our relationship with our children.

As parents I think that a large part of the stress we’re loaded up with comes from problems in our relationship with our kids. We are tired and don’t want to attend to their genuine needs or they are feeling fractious and are acting it out in ways that certainly bring their needs to our attention but also press buttons from our childhood that cause us to back off from our kids like our parents did to us. So our parent’s bad relationship with us begins to repeat itself.

I believe the solution to these problems is to work on the relationship and to strengthen it. I confess that sometimes I don’t know how to do this and at other times I just don’t have the inner strength but I still think it is important because it’s really apparent that when the relationships are suffering our kid’s behaviour really goes downhill.

Our oldest is someone born with incredible persistence, she never waits until she is sure she can do something before trying she just starts doing it. She started walking at 9 months and fell down about a million times learning but she got their quickly. She learned to ride a bike without trainer wheels over a period of about three days when she was 3 years old – she just never gives up no matter how hair-raising it got. Unfortunately when her emotional needs are not being met this same level of persistence amounts to total harassment for us parents. We’re lucky their’s two of us so we can tag-team her when there’s a problem. She’d be a nightmare for a solo parent or for a school, especially as all the co-sleeping and non-coercive efforts we have gone to have made her a very strong person. I think she’ll be an amazing person when she’s an adult (yes, I know this is her father talking :-) but right now she can be really hard for us.

With all that in mind, when our kids got back home yesterday afternoon after having spent the second day in a row away from us she was incredibly difficult, the worst I’ve ever seen. I also got the angriest I’ve ever felt at her because of it and it wasn’t a nice evening. We were at our wit’s end.

After we’d managed to get them off to bed we sat down and to figure our where we’d goen wrong and decided to try to get back on track.

Basically she went to bed and slept in physical contact with Adi (oldest daughter) all night, told her she loved her a million times and (this is very important) apologised for the things she hadn’t got right without making excuses about it being hard and this morning when we got up Adi was back to her normal self again. Just like that

Honestly it feels like someone has waved a magic wand over the girl. It’s a testament to the bedrock strength of Karen’s relationship with our kids that she can do that even when she’s under stress. I suspect that conventional parenting techniques cause the parents to have to shut off their feelings for their children while they teach the child to ‘cry it out’ and that it leaves them permanently numbed to one degree or another. Staying connected to your kids means you have a really deep love to draw on when things get tough.

Karen is still in need of a break for a few more days but we’re going to do it by having me come out of the office for parts of the day and she’s going to take them out for things like bush walks because it is also apparent from our fussy-baby (now five) that time spent in nature has a very soothing effect. 

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08/25/2007

Guns and Gold

You may have read a little about the economic crash in Argentina and how nice middle-class ladies were seen attacking ATM machines with knives amidst other mayhem. Well here's an article formed out of what appears to have been a series of postings to a peak oil message board by a guy living in Argentina. From what he says Argentina is in a permanent post-crash situation and the article is both highly illuminating and very frightening with the advice it dispenses. Particularly worrying is the amount of time the guys spent talking about guns.

Yes I still believe that oportunites for community will occur but I after this I am much more convinced of the need to be  prepared for, shall we say, other eventualities.

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08/24/2007

Home Work

Further to Ran’s discussion of roofing materials yesterday, I was indeed glad he bought the issue up, We will probably end up using a modern roofing material on the house we will build but I think we will make it steep enough so that long term some kind of thatch can be used over the top of it when it begins to fail, or else make the timbers strong enough that they can take homemade clay tiles if it comes to that.

Ran quoted an email of mine which ended with:

This roofing issue is hard, maybe we need to get away from attempting to go long term and look at what renewable materials are available locally so we know we can always maintain it.

If we’re looking long term then this really is our only option but I have to admit that it wasn’t my ‘position’ on sustainability that prompted me to make this comment. It was a combination of trying to think really long term along with a quote from a book called Home Work, by Llod Kahn. This quote got the point across to me in a way that no one had previously:

In the early 70’s I got on a charter flight to Ireland, crossed the Irish Sea and got a long ride with a salesman; when he learned I was interested in building he started pointing out buildings and showing us that each was built of materials from near the site. You see the slate roofs, there’s a slate quarry nearby…” and then, “Now the roofs are tile because there is clay in the soil here…” As we travelled through England, it was striking: the thatched roofs in Norfolk, land of marshes and reeds; the sandstone walls of the Cotswalds, where the light tan colours blend perfectly with the surroundings; cob in Devon; flint in Sussex…

I got the book because it has a photo collection of unusual and low-tech buildings in it. It will serve as creative fuel for when I get to designing our new place but it also has more than that. It's full of inspiration for dropping out and using non-mainstream methods of constructing homes. Plus it's great eye-candy. Here’s some of the pictures from the front cover. Note the house on the little island.

One thing that bugged me though was the collection of people in the book who had gone off the grid. The main focus for all of them was their wind and solar power generating systems. Clearly the issue of EROEI was never discussed but somehow it seems worse that in their attempts to get ‘away from it all’ they had actually bought ‘a lot of it’ with them. They had simply altered the energy equation so that they could maintain essentially the same lifestyle - except with the addition of more trees about the place.

A minor quibble though, it's a great book, not just for the know-how but also for the inspiration. 

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08/22/2007

The Root

Via Idleworm a great video, Money As Debt by Paul Grignon, explaining the economic system we live/serve in. If the economic system has never quite made sense to you or seemed to beyond comprehension this will put it all in perpsective.

Basically though, you were right. It doesn't quite make sense.

I'd imbed the video here if I could but Blogspirit is not yet part of the Google empire and I'm no hacker.

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08/18/2007

Well beaten path

Via Idleworm, we might be the last culture to try large cities but we certainly weren't the first - researchers discover that Angkor Wat in Cambodia used to cover an area the size of Los Angeles.

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08/17/2007

Piggish Sexism

What I think is, a women’s place is in the home. But only if she’s got kids right? That’s fair.

Howl’s of outrage anyone? What about if I said a man’s place is in the home too. Would that make a difference?

I work at home and now that our oldest is five is obvious that if I was away from them all day they would be missing something. They notice if I am out for more than a few hours and ask Karen where I’ve gone,  and they like to be able to come and visit me in the office regularly throughout the day.

So if it’s clear that I should be at home it must be true that the mother, who small children are more attached, to should also be at home.

I’m especially happy to be saying this since I saw this interview of Aaron Russo. Russo was asked to join the global elite by Nick Rockefeller after they had known each other for a few years. He of course chose not to but before they parted company Rockefeller told him that the elites helped promote feminism - for two reasons. One was so they could tax women. All that work they did in the house couldn’t be taxed but now that women go out to work someone else gets paid to clean the house and look after their kids and very probably the family eats out a lot more too.

The second reason to promote feminism was to break up the family

I’m not saying the stated goals of feminism were wrong. I totally agree that women should have the same rights as men. I also think children should have the same rights as well, but clearly the whole thing has been hijacked to the elite's advantage. Ironic as it may seem now the most radical act a women could make these days is to stay at home.

I’m still making my way through Hold on to Your Kids by Gordon Nuefield and the one area I would disagree with him on is that he proposes an attachment village as the solution to children being away from their parents a lot of the time. He’s trying not to rock society’s boat and point the finger at anyone, which is fine, a lot of people will listen to him because of it.

I think this sort of thing is partially why the conservative Christian right has appeal to some people – because they can see where left wing movements have gone wrong. Of course their response it similarly one-dimensional nad probably plays into the hands of the elite in a different way.

My instincts tend toward the left but they make it hard and harder for me, so much of what they do contributes to the power the state has over our lives. In New Zealand we have a child-less (rumoured to be lesbian) women as Labour Prime Minister . All this fair gets the Christian’s in a lather – especially as lately she's been encouraging women to leave the home and go and join the work force to help the economy. Of course the more noise the Christians make the more galvanised the activist community on the left gets. It fair drives me nuts, they’re supposed to both be fighting for the rights of people on the bottom of societies heap - according to their respective manifestos - but are much more interested in squabbling with each other.

I seem to have digressed. What I want to say is, fight the bastards by loving your kids and staying in their lives. Hold on to Your Kids is a great resource for that, as is anything that promotes non-coercive parenting and co-sleeping. And remember, by staying at home you not only deprive the system of your children you also deprive it of your economic input.

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08/14/2007

Armegeddon and all that stuff

Just read this excellent article from Information Clearning House by Carolyn Baker. I've read a lot of intelligent and scathing articles about the corruption of America by a guy called Mike Whitney at ICH but this, if anything, is better. For people who don't read Cryptogon or similar sites this article will give you a nice summary of where things are with the US economic system.

Carolyn Baker talks a lot about the corruption of the system and mentions the law changes that are going to be used to control the population, I just wish I could find someone in New Zealand who was making a similar conmmentary for us down here.

I think I'm going to have to resurrect my old radio show so I can have an excuse to interview people like Carolyn Baker.

Stop Press. No I won't. I just went to her website and saw that she already does radio.

Anyway, here's a wee quote:

It is crucial to understand that the current economic meltdown is a transfer of wealth from the middle and lower classes to the ruling elite. Wealth transfers do not just happen, nor are they the products of incompetency. They are intentional and well-planned. Central to wealth transfer is corruption at the highest levels of the economic and political systems

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08/13/2007

Holographic Universe

This is more Ran’s territory than mine but here, via Free Range Organic Human is a fascinating article about how the universe is a hologram.

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The article has a myriad of links and upon following one of them  I discovered that it had a New Zealand based domain. Out of curiosity I went to the homepage and discovered this Indigenous Weather Modification site. Until the advent of the internet there really was nothing else that could deliver this degree of ‘unusualness’ to my life.

The operator of the site claims to be able to modify the weather using unspecified techniques that seem to be based on traditional Maori knowledge. It would also seem that the universe-as-hologram theory could be used to understand how it might work.

Delving further into the site I discovered something that had a fantastic only-in-New Zealand quality to it:

A Maori Sovereignty group had wanted to fly the Maori Independence flag on the Auckland Harbour Bridge on Waitangi day, New Zealand’s National day. The body that overseas the bridge, Transit New Zealand, had refused permission and upset a great number of Maori including the person running this website.

Shortly after this hit the headlines Transit New Zealand received an email from John Porter, weather modification consultant, telling them that he was going to teach them a lesson to the tune of $100 million dollars of weather related damage to New Zealand roads.

I can only guess at the reaction of the staff of Transit New Zealand at the arrival of this email – or at their reaction at the arrival of subsequent emails toting up the costs after every piece of bad weather we’ve had this winter.

I know this isn’t usual Village Blog fare and I can’t verify any of it except that the storms did in fact happen but I just love a good story. 

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08/12/2007

Paranoia

I'm feeling really frustrated at the level of paranoia that exists around these parts at the moment. Sure there is plenty of commentary about the technical issues surrounding the money markets, peak oil and the machinations of power but when these technical experts start trying to predict the human response to these technical situations they unknowingly step into an area where I think they are out of their depth. They seem to be quite unaware that their thinking  has been colonised by the Mad Max 'scenario' that the elites regularly feed us through the media. I talked about community v Mad Max in a previous post but now I want to deal with this damn paranoia thing.

This has been triggered by Ted's post on the issue but it is just the tip of the iceberg for me.

The first thing I want to deal with is the idea of agent provocateurs. I've got a rough list of people I’ve seen mentioned in this context. Before I get into this though I want to say up front how appalled I am at the lack of judgement people seem to bring to this problem - relying instead on a kind of personalised suspicion to decide who to trust. I really want people to talk less about who the source a particular piece of news is and instead discuss the power of the facts and the argument they present. Naturally this is harder and involves reading more widely and building up our map of the world but if we hadn’t been dumbed down at school this is precisely what we would do without beign conscious of it.

Noam Chomsky. I’ve seen people say he is a CIA asset because of his position on the JFK thing. Whilst anything is possible in this world I find it hard to believe that anyone could fake the kind of analysis he brings to his writings. He’s the best there is in his area. I think we need to accept the role that human emotion plays in the lives of these people (of course to do that we have to first accept the role it plays in the decisions we make, but that’s another posting).

Chomsky is able to obliterate the US government’s stated reasons for it’s foreign policy by using it’s own documents. What he does is impossible to argue with if you’ve got an open mind - Impossible. I think he’s comfortable doing what he does, he's carved out a particular niche for himself and doesn’t see the point in straying into vaguer territory – and he basically says as much.

Besides, if he was a CIA asset he’s not doing a very good job because it was a Chomsky book that got me started on my move away from the mainstream. He’s a great gateway radical.

Amy Goodman and Greg Palast: Yes they have their limits too, they come from a traditional journalistic background and they probably just can’t handle the idea that 9-11 was an inside job (this is a problem for the vast majority of the population). They also hang out with other journalists, especially Palast with his BBC connections, and no doubt have the very human urge to want to be liked and fit in with their crowd. It takes a bloody-minded bastard like John Pilger to be the sort of journalist we’re looking for.

All that aside though, if mainstream journalists were like Palast and Goodman the world would be a profoundly different place.

Michael Moore:  Basically Michael Moore is positioned where the Democratic Party is supposed to be, its entirely possible that he provides a boundary to what is considered acceptable leftism but on the other hand he has bought a few issues out into the open in a way that is accessible for a lot of ‘normal’ people and that’s nothing that anyone else I can think of has achieved.

He’s another gateway too, his website has links to more radical sites and he’ll set a lot of people off down a path of radicalism before he’s done.

Derrick Jensen: This suggestion was part of the discussion at Free Range Organic Human on the basis that Derrick does promotes the idea of destroying civilisation and that this would play directly into the hands of the elites. I can just see it now; “It’s not just swarthy men you have to look out for. Now the terrorists look like us. They could be your neighbour, or your friend, or the person behind the counter at the supermarket. You better look out!”.

That’s exactly where the PTB want to take us but Derrick is very real. Like Chomsky the power of his analysis is just too good to be conjured up. Reading A language Older than Words shifted my thinking in the same way my first Chomsky book did.

Having said that though, I see no reason why the PTB wouldn’t promote Derrick’s books, even without his knowledge, because a bunch of anarchists bombing cell phone towers and dams has got to be one of their ultimate dreams.

Daily Kos: OK this guy is pure CIA, no doubt about it 

Gloria Steinem:  Sorry folks, it looks like the CIA funded Ms Magazine. I found it  hard to choose between the  jesus-is-saviour link or the save-the-males link but choose the ‘males’ one in the end. There’s a bit of ranting about feminists destroying society but follow their links to their source documents if you want. It certainly does tie in with this astounding interview with Aaron Russo where he said the Rockefellers promoted feminism to help break up the family and make children dependant on the state from an early age.

Now here’s the catch, none of these people need to be CIA assets for this whole thing to work. I just wasted a bunch of time researching and writing this post to try to deal with the paranoia that’s out there, while other people are getting into arguments about it or are just plain confused about who they can trust. All an agent provocateur needs to do is seed a little doubt about various people and they very quickly get us all running around in circles like a bunch of headless chooks.

We shouldn’t forget that going to school made us  think we need an authoritative voice to trust so it’s important to rebel by ignoring the personalities and developing our own judgement on these issues.

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The suggestion that Greg Palast was an agent provocateur came from some people commenting at Cryptogon (including Matt Savinar) and Matt turned up again, quoted by Sharon (link see comment 22), in a discussion about  a proposed general strike in the US:

“I think most Americans may also be too frightened. I emailed the guy who hosts lifeaftertheoilcrash.com, and he emailed back that participation in a general strike would end with me being tortured and raped in an internment camp.”

I have to say I don’t know what else was in the email but the above advice is not very good. Matt Savinar has a great deal of technical expertise but not a lot of understanding of human nature.

Derrick Jensen has written that the Jews in Warsaw who actively opposed the Nazis had a better survival rate than those who kept quiet. He emphasises this a lot for obvious reasons and it’s something people in the US might do well to remember.

Aside from that though, a proper general strike would involve way too many people for the PTB to deal with. They might assassinate an organiser but getting everyone who strikes would be an impossibility. The PTB know this which is why they have schools and Television to keep everyone apathetic and afraid.

I’m starting to think that if anyone is an agent provocateur it’s Matt Savinar, the paranoia seeping out of LATOC is palpable and as I’ve said before one of my major fears about post crash culture will be the peak oil survivalists. I want to know where they are going to be so I can go somewhere else. Matt won’t tell anyone where he is and may well move again I hear. I don’t think there’s much more we can learn from someone who hasn’t the good sense to build a community around him.

Please note I’m not actually saying he IS a provocateur, I can’t prove that and he’s probably just a graduate of an American childhood of schooling and television. What I am saying though is his advice needs augmenting by reading some Derrick Jensen or Ran Prieur.

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08/10/2007

On the brink

I was planning to write a post about dropping out but geopolitical events of the last two weeks have rather distracted me. It really feels like the financial system is on the verge of a serious collapse. A few weeks ago there was a collapse of a couple of hedge funds in the US and this week there have been problems with funds in Europe as well and now the European Central Bank has released a truckload of credit into the system to make up for a lack of ‘liquidity’.

Basically no one is buying anymore.

Oh yeah, and China is threatening to withdraw it’s support of the US economy.

All this is kind of independent of the peak oil issue and It’s been a long time coming but I’m starting to feel like there’s not going to be much left to drop out of fairly soon. It’s not a good feeling.

I’m supposed to be working on getting prepared to ride out the crash but it’s so easy to get distracted by normal every day stuff – especially when you have children. I have to admit that when I wander round town with everyone going about their usual business it’s hard to hold the idea in my head that it’s all going to end – or at least change a hell of a lot. And when we were travelling in the bus, totally immersed in our immediate life experience it was nearly impossible to hang onto the idea.

It does feel more real this week though, especially as a friend told me ont he phone today that at a spiritual level he feels like a massive paradigm shift will happen in the next couple of days. I don’t yet know what he bases that on but it just adds to a growing sense of unease that I have – and it’s not helping me make decisions. I may actually just have to makes some guesses on a few things - which I don’t normally like to do.

However, in the event of life continuing in a kind of normal way for some time yet, which is just as likely, here’s some thoughts on dropping out;

I was looking in the Cryptogon archives the other day for an old posting and discovered this instead, it’s from the comments as opposed to an actual posting but here’s what Kevin had to say about dropping out.

… I formally studied insurgency and counter insurgency in college. I have a pretty good grasp of how low intensity warfare works, theoretically. I thought long and hard about how I could strike the most damaging blow possible to this diabolical system.

Drop out.

Dropping out to the extent possible is the best choice. Doing that hurts this system in a serious way.
And, nope, it’s not easy out here on the Farmlet. But nobody said it was going to be easy! If I ever start to feel as though it’s too rough, all I have to do is think about that corporate prison camp reality I left behind. Fixes me right up.

What interests me about this is that someone like Ran agrees with him. The two guys are operating in entirely different head spaces, one a philospher, the other a techie but they’ve arrived at the same place on this issue.

The only thing I would add to that is that the simplest way of dropping out is to become debt free, or at least less in-debted. I’d estimate that roughly half of economic activity is devoted to generating income to pay back loans, meaing that half of economic activity is dedicated to gifting money to the people who own our banks, bless their flinty little souls.

Put aside things like leaving our high paying jobs and living lightly, the one, most signficant thing we can do is to focus on getting out of debt. We got our of debt in about 6 years, which means we have deprived the banking system of 19 years of interest payments. The other benefit of course, is that we have a lot more freedom because of it, which was thereal motivating factor at the time - not striking a blow to the heart of capitalism :-) Although the two issues are intimately tied together.

Basically our entire society has evolved as a mechanism for creating wealth for banks, it’s why we must have growth for the economy to function successfully. It's so that us serfs pay our dues to our masters, except now they’ve realised there is a limit to growth and are in the process of engineering a fun new system for us.

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08/07/2007

Rough Vision

We were discussing Intentional Communities on a New Zealand Unschooler list and I was asked about what our vision for an intentional community (IC) might actually be. The question kind of stopped me in my tracks. Up until fairly recently I'd had quite a strong set of ideas - it is going to be this, this and this. However since I've been through the disillusionment phase I'm not feeling nearly so prescriptive. Anyway, I sat down with Karen to figure out what it was that was important to us about a community.

PARENTING STUFF

Aside from being a place that would support people who want to unschool we would also like to provide support for people who want to practice things like homebirthing, co-sleeping, non-vaccination and non-coercive/unconditional parenting.

These are the things that come to mind first when we think of a community, maybe it's the stage we're at but it seems to be the area of children that people are most judgemental about. We want to see support for these things, but if someone also didn't want to do these things we would also be supportive of that choice. It's important to have that freedom but we would be unhappy if the balance swung back the other way. I don't think it's likely too but it is a kind of grey area.

The parts of that we feel slightly more prescriptive about are with the unconditional parenting. I remember someone on the continuum-concept list complaining that in her co-housing community another parent had been shouting at her children in a particularly nasty way. Because of that there would probably need to be a requirement that other adults should treat a child in the manner that the parents request.

Not everyone is in a position to homeschool, but it would be a disappointment if we ended up in a place where most of the children left for the day. Again we don't want to make rules - especially as people sometimes need time to make changes like that, so we're counting on the vision statement filtering out people who aren't keen on these things.

I know that mainstream people worry about unschooled children just running wild but to be honest I love the idea that the kids would have that kind of freedom - I hope they could roam all over property while the older ones can keep an eye on the younger ones and they're free to build the self-reliance that previous generations had until we got so scared that we even supervise out kids when they walk between the car and the house.

ADULTS

As with kids we would like to have a place where the majority of adults don't leave for the day. Obviously some people are tied to a certain type of job so there has to be a lot of tolerance with this one but our vision for community is definitely that people are around a lot.

It's a given that ICs provide well for the community interaction side of things but we also think it is essential that the physical structure of the property and building allow for a variety of interactions so that it can nurture smaller groups, nuclear families, couples and individuals. We feel that people need to be able to have as much time alone as they require if the community side of life is to prosper.

We want to minimise the amount of compulsory activity that members will have to be involved with, although there will obviously be a degree of property maintenance work to attend to.

Most of us are aware of the damage that the world does to children and have probably also become aware that some of that stuff has happened to us so it could be good to create an environment that is healing for adults. Hopefully
people will have more space to focus on this area because if the structure of the community is done right we will feel less overwhelmed by the responsibilities of parenting.

PROPERTY

We're looking for something that is rural, because we want a few animals, a good forest and trees etc but is also closely integrated with the larger community of a nearby town (such as Raglan).

We think that there should be capacity for people to leave and extract their money from the community with relative ease. The last thing anyone wants are unwilling members.

Some parts of the property will probably be communally owned while other parts will be individually owned

PERMACULTURE

We imagine principals of permaculture will be used to design the layout on the property and we are quite keen on having a food forest and on being relatively self sufficient as far as food is concerned - although not in a mad obsessive way where we prefer to go hungry rather than actually pay for food :-)

PEAK OIL

I don't know how many people have heard of this issue (it's been aired on TV3 occasionally) We're taking it seriously and want to see some kind of focus on low tech human-powered technologies. This is another of these things that not everyone needs to be into but I would personally like to have one or two other people around to work with on this.

ECOLOGY STUFF

We kind of take it as a given that what ever happens will be done in an environmentally friendly way and that food will be organically grown. I'm undecided about whether people could use sprays on their private garden. On the one hand I'd like people to be free to do what they want there but on the other it does affect the rest of the land. Denmark banned Roundup recently because they found that it was seeping into their underground water supply.

SPIRITUAL RELGIOUS STUFF

Karen is a christian and I'm not. Karen would like to have someone else around her shares her faith but we are also very clear that we don't want all, or even lots, of the members to be christian. As for having a variety of faiths - I'd be uncomfortable with having 'competing' faiths together in one place, I'm not sure that a community could handle it but I also agree with Scott Peck that exclusiveness is the opposite of community so I haven't made my mind up about that. This is my view as a secular observer incidentally.

GIVING BACK

We intend that the community will be in a position to give back to the wider community somehow. It won't be in a single focus way where everyone does the same thing but if someone wants to take in foster children then the community will support that person in doing so (the community won't have to support the children though - only the member involved in that activity) If someone wants to focus on providing food to a foodbank then there should be some land set aside for that purpose. If someone wants to organise some kind of support group to meet on the site then that's good too. It won't be compulsory to give something back to the wider community either but we intend to create a place where it's much easier for members to do that sort of thing than it would normally be.

GENERAL ATMOSPHERE

Definitely there will be no single issue or single focus involved with the community. It is mostly about supporting people where they are at - and helping them to move forward when they're ready. We hope that people will be able to let their defences down a bit more than they currently do. From what I've read it's likely that living like this will 'bring up stuff' for people so we'll have to have ways of dealing with this also.

Decisions will probably be made by consensus once the community is up and running and it would probably be a good idea for us to take a course on how to operate in consensus because it's not something our culture is very good
at.

Somehow we want to create a relaxed, fun, healing (anything else?) atmosphere that is noticeable to people when they come to visit

We hope that most people will work (and relax) on site and that a result of this will be that our unschooled children will have a variety of activities at their disposal to learn about should they want to

PERSONAL NOTE

I'm keen to build an earth house quite soon and would like to have people to do that with (maybe we can build two?) because I'm really poorly motivated when I work by myself :-)

Plus, I know virtually everything here is considered to be radical by the mainstream but we are both from mainstream backgrounds and are kind of torn by the fact that we can't talk about this stuff with the people who we are most at home with. Because of that we don't want a community of people who are against the world, we want to still be fully integrated with mainstream society and have friends etc outside the community.

WHAT ELSE?

is there anything I've forgotten?

10:15 Posted in Village Progress | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this

08/06/2007

Step One

This is the post I’ve been meaning to write ever since I started the blog. The first thing anyone should do if they mean to start any kind of community is get this book; Creating a Life Together by Diana Leafe Christian. That includes for people wanting to start Ecovillages, co-housing communities or even Palaeolithic tribes (are you listening Tribe of Anthropik?).

Diana Leafe Christian is the editor of Communities Magazine and has visited many, many intentional communities. She asserts at the start that 90% of intentional communities fail and then goes about explaining what it is that the 10% do differently.

In short the answer is mostly to do with the vision the community has and making sure that all community members are in agreement about it at the earliest possible stage. Her recommended way of creating a vision is for only 2 or 3 couples/individuals to form a core group and to work out a vision for the community they wish to start. Once the vision is set in stone only then does she suggest you go out and seek other members for the community.

With a clear vision document it should be clear to potential members what they are getting into and only people who are in agreement with that vision should come on board. Once a larger group has formed their job is to work out the details of the vision, learn consensus decisions making and to form themselves into a community.

Only at this point does she recommend that the community starts looking for land. Usually this is the very first thing that people do so there is a whole chapter devoted to why the purchase of land should be delayed.

Essentially Creating a Life Together is a bible for people looking to start a community and we certainly won’t be leaving home without it. Not only does it outline the steps but offers much more; from how to get to know people properly to processes that will help you unearth what your key values are so that they can come to the surface during the visioning process rather than years later when it’s too late.

It's a very comprehensive book that takes a while to get through but it is pretty essential, I can’t think of any other way an individual could come by the crucial information it contains about setting up communities except by reading it. I’d like to think that every member of a community I go into would not just have read it but actually own a copy of Creating a Life Together.

I’m intending for my next posting to be a rough form of vision document that we've worked up.

12:30 Posted in Recommended Reading , Village Progress | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this

08/03/2007

Isolation

It’s a regular occurrence to read comments on the anti-civ blogs (and from the bloggers themselves) about how people don’t know anyone else nearby who they shares their views. I also see people on email discussion lists making this same complaint.

The internet is great at connecting people up but ultimately it is all promise and very little delivery and there is something slightly worrying about how it moulds my behaviour. Initially there is a great flush of excitement upon discovering this wonderful anti-civ corner of the web and this conditions us to keep coming back to the computer for more.

Unfortunately the connections made online can only ever be made at an intellectual level. Maybe sometimes someone will write something that will get you on an emotional level but ultimately the sense of community and acceptance I keep trying to get out of my computer is not forthcoming.

I’m currently spending most of my day working in a room by myself working so it’s even worse right now but what happens is that I get online and start browsing blogs looking for something meaningful.  I’m well versed in anti civ thinking these days so it’s harder and harder to find something to give me that old hit,  plus I probably only just ‘did the rounds’ recently and there’s hardly anything new. I usually begin to stray further and further past the edges of my blog-circle in the hope of  finding something that interests me.

I end up skim reading a bunch of stuff that doesn’t excite me and finally when I feel completely flat and empty I stagger out of the room in search of real people. Luckily I have a family and there’s usually a real person somewhere in the house when I need one.

So is this a zero-sum game? Does the fantastic information and insight I gain from the internet make up for the appalling effect it has on my social life. I mean, if I didn’t spend all this time online I wouldn’t be on this whole new ‘plane of existence’ that separates me from my real life peers and instead I’d probably be out there hanging with them. Is it really worth it when the only thing that really gives meaning to life are the real-life connections I make?

Hold on! I hear you say. Aren’t you forgetting about spiritual and mental development in that mix? – What about the search for insight and truth? Isn’t that important? Don’t we need that too?.

I’m not sure.  Some of that can be quite self indulgent that questing for truth. We can also get spiritual development out of rubbing up against other people in real life situations  - if we aren’t too careful about keeping a safe distance that is. I think it’s the type of development humans are supposed to have too.

‘Course, I’m not ready to give up the net yet but I do think I need to find a way to put all this stuff to practical use. I think that’s why I like Comrade Simba, in a single posting from him you can usually get a bit of philosophy mixed in with instructions on how to build a water pump. There’s something kind of grounded and even soothing about that.

******************************************

Meanwhile back in the real world we still feel incredibly isolated – our crazy extremist ways seem to upset people no end.  I’m starting to understand why people who do unusual things are so dogmatic about what they do, it’s because they receive so much grief from their family and friends. They’re forced to erect a big rapid response defence mechanism because of the very people who should be accepting them unconditionally.

Surely it’s not wrong to expect that those close to us will accept us unconditionally?   I see unconditional acceptance so rarely that I sometimes wonder if I am wrong. After all I can count on the fingers of a hand with two fingers how many people there are in our family who can actually do that - and I expect we should be thankful for small mercies

I’ve also been hearing from other people about our unsupportive culture. I’ve heard so much that I’m kind of channelling their collective frustration at the moment (lucky thing I have a blog). 

I know this is a familiar pattern of the world but isn’t there something really, really wrong with it?  How can I put this in perspective?

We, in our nuclear family, decide how we want to live our lives and the people we depend on for emotional support and a sense of belonging start to shun us or criticise us because of decisions that have absolutely no effect on their lives?

This is clearly bonkers but it seems like no one can see it.  I could come up with a complex psychological explanation to explain this – hell I’m great at that stuff – but it would do nothing to dispel the sense of bewilderment  I feel that people are like this. They care less about their relationship with us than they do about…      about…

What is it they’re so worried about exactly? 

Tell me, someone.  Why do you people try to make us feel bad because we choose to co-sleep, or home school with our children? These are loving things to do and they don’t hurt or even affect you one bit but you still can’t help yourselves.

Why do you care so much about what we do with our lives if you seemingly care so little about your relationship with us that you damage it by acting this way?

We can’t have people close to us who are trying to undermine us all the time – especially when the only reason you do it is because what you’re feeling a bit uncomfortable.  We don’t want this to happen any more.

Except we need to have someone close to us.

*******************************************************

Like I said, I’m painting a picture on behalf of a lot of people there, and it’s only half the picture too – here’s the good news:

After giving up the dream of ever living in a village, some friends of ours recently revealed to us that they want to start a village too. Isn’t is always this way?  It doesn’t actually matter if we don’t start one with them because now we feel like it’s really possible again – only this time the fanatical edge has disappeared. I was always aware not to get too carried away but there’s something about letting go of a dream that makes us much more reasonable when we the dream comes back. I’m cautious too, I don’t want to push too hard anymore, or prescribe too much for others.

We’ve been discussing all this stuff on a New Zealand Unschooling list. It’s a great place for support and what I like about it is that not only are there people on there who have gone before us but the members comes from a reasonable wide range of backgrounds so there is a lot of balance to the group. (Scott Peck says that’s one of the characteristics of true community incidentally).

Through the list we have been delighted to discover people nearby who have chosen a similar lifestyle – and are suffering similar, probably worse problems - hopefully we’ll get to hang out with them soon.

I’m looking forward to it.

12:33 Posted in Modern Life Is Rubbish | Permalink | Comments (6) | Email this

How to build an inuit dog sled

It's always interesting to check the stats for this site to see where people are coming from and in the last day or so someone came to Villageblog via a search engine and the following keywords; inuit dog sled how built.

Amusingly they would have been directed to this page with a story about how someone once made an inuit dog sled. It's such a good story I'll post it again.

[I was listening to a talk] by a guy called Wade Davis who was hunting around the tip of Baffin Island and met an individual (whose name wasn't clear in the recording) who told a story about his grandfather who refused to go into one of the Inuit settlements;

 "His family took away his tools and implements, hoping that it would oblige him to go into the settlement. Did it work? No. He simply stepped out into the arctic night and in the darkness, pulled down his trousers and defecated into his hand. As the faeces froze he shaped it into a blade. He put a spray of saliva along the edge and as the shit-knife took form he butchered a dog. He skinned the dog with it and made a harness, he took the rib cage of the dog and made a sled and harnessing the sled to an adjacent dog he took off over the iceflows"

 

I wonder if they decided to use this technique or not? 

10:36 Posted in General | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

08/02/2007

Teeth 2 (the return of the teeth)

After my recent five-filling marathon at the dentist I decided that whatever modern dentistry had to offer, it wasn't enough for me. I followed some of the links Ran posted after his recent visit to a dentist and here's what I have learned. Some of this is from a retired chemist at this site. I include the link because it wasn't directly included in Ran's selection. In order to really review his ideas I would need to read his book which I haven't done but I do think there is a lot of merit in listening to people from other fields.

1. It's not bacteria that eat into our teeth, it's acid. It is often however the bacteria that produce the acid (by fermenting glucose) when they consume the food we put in our mouth. Apparently this is basic chemistry:  The proton on the acid pulls the phosphate out of the enamel and fast, if you sip water is reacts with the acid to form a hydronium ion and saves the enamel. 

2. Some food are naturally acidic, like citrus fruit and tomatoes. This makes sense to me, sometimes after drinking orange juice it actually feels like a layer has been stripped from my teeth. 

3. The acid does it's stuff for only a short period which is why dentists say not to eat between meals, so that your teeth are free of acid for long periods of the day - if only they could have explained why.

4. Rinsing your mouth with water or milk or coffee neutralises the acid immediately so have a drink to sip while you eat. Note; I tried this and it does leave a weird taste if you've just had something like citrus fruit to eat.

5. Sugars have large molecules so they only eat into teeth slowly. Wash the sugar off by all means but don't panic about it. Also fruit sugars are more complex than refined sugars

6.  Enamel is made of Calcium and Phosphate and it can rebuild if we are consuming enough of those minerals - which we currently do not - and I clearly am not.

7. Taking calcium pills and monosodium phosphate pills is one way of strengthening your teeth. Presumably there are foods that will do the same so I'm open to suggestions. Perhaps permaculturists can help us make sure we have the right minerals in the soil to ensure healthy teeth.

8. Vitamin D delivers calcium to the site - so go out and sunbathe! Actually the guy suggested more pills.

9. Brush your teeth with regular bar soap!  Sounds gross I know but this guy insists it's a good idea. He says soap is anti bacterial and only takes 2 rinses to wash off. On the other hand normal toothpaste leaves glycerine on your teeth, because it takes 20 rinses to get off, and will prevent re-enamalisation from taking place,   Someone on a forum suggested tooth soap which I had never heard of but it might be a more palatable option. Just check the ingrediants first. My 2 year old has experimented with brushing with soap but I have to admit to feeling strangely reluctant.

10. Avoid flouride, it's a heavily negative chemical (visit the site for a slightly lengthier explanation). 

11. My teeth still feel funny after my visit to the dentist and it's been a week 

Ran's latest posting on this subject has a couple more links one of which confirms some of this and also adds:

12. Don't brush straight after eating because the enamel will be soft and you'll brush some of it away. 

It's ridiculous that I knew none of this information before I started looking. I'm going to try it out (not sure about the soap though) and see how it goes. I could hardly do any worse. If you want to add to this or argue please feel free, I'm keen to learn more. 

01:35 Posted in Crash | Permalink | Comments (7) | Email this